Welcome to the new, slowly developing part of our website devoted to the Enlightenemnt: in the past, today and - we hope - in the future. Rejuvenation of the idea and fostering
a new, more sophisticated and democratic Enlightenment is one of our principal goals - in Poland and beyond!

Left and right critiques of the Enlightenment have differed in tone, but their images of the Enlightenment are remarkably similar, and similarly distorted. Postwar German thinkers were the most explosive. The cosmopolitan refugee Theodor Adorno could not have been more different from the pontificating village Nazi Martin Heidegger. Though they loathed each other profoundly, and disagreed about everything else, both claimed that fascism was the result of the Enlightenment. In short, if you seek to unite contemporary thinkers across nearly every spectrum, youd do well to invoke the spectre of the Enlightenment monster: a beast filled with icy contempt for the instincts and driven by a blind, dumb optimism or a totalitarian lust for domination. The monster is relentlessly cheerful, stupendously gullible, and inevitably naive. If not quite the mad scientist in the cellar, the Enlightenment is the sorcerers apprentice, a callow fool who releases forces that overpower us all.

The term Enlightenment refers to a unique set of ideas and ideals that came to fruition in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It began with Bacon, Descartes, Locke, and other philosophers who sought a universal method for establishing knowledge. They looked to science as the model for knowledge and debated whether reason or experience was most important (actually, both are equally important). No doubt they took impetus from the remarkable discoveries of Newton and Galileo in mathematics, physics, and astronomy. The Enlightenment culminated with the French philosophes, Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet and d'Holbach, who popularized its ideas in Parisian salons, pamphlets, and books, enabling those ideas to spread to a wider educated public.

Susan Neiman: Making Progress: Rethinking Enlightenment

Moral philosopher Susan Neiman debunks the myths spread by the Enlightenment bashers. She argues that a progressive political outlook depends on a return to a robust Enlightenment.

Heroes Of The Enlightenment (Ep.1)

The documentary explores the fact that from Google, and Facebook and Wikipedia to the systems of democracy, finance, manufacture and the law - many aspects of modern life owe their existence to a single defining period: the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century.
In the space of barely 100 years, Western deference to divine and royal authority gave way to a belief that humans had the power to understand their own nature and the universe around them. Holy writ gave way to empirical investigation, the power of miracles to that of logic and reason. In The Power of Knowledge we can see it was a revolution in ideas, information and technology.

Heroes Of The Enlightenment (Ep. 2)

The second part of the fantastic BBC documentary. Filmed in locations across Britain, France, Germany, Portugal and America, this illuminating series brings to life some of the key characters of the era - Newton, Erasmus, Darwin, Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, Frederick the Great and Thomas Jefferson - and the ideas that shaped the world we live in today.